TiffinyKaye
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- May 22, 2013
Well, it’s after 9 PM here…and I haven’t done a smidgen of homework tonight. Sigh. Guess that’s what I’m doing all night tomorrow. I’ve found that it’s really hard for me to focus on stuff I need to do when there’s still a lot of stuff that I I want to do. With school (I’m getting an MBA…hopefully…), I just have not had the time to dedicate to Disboards Weddings & Honeymoons that I’d like. It turns out it was a massive mistake to do school in the months prior to my nuptials. I feel like I haven’t had the opportunity to really savor the experience. Now all I am is stressed out…but not just because of the wedding. :/
So, in my attempt to just get it all off my chest and hopefully focus just on homework for the rest of the week…I’ll try to pick up where I left off. I’m also going to try to do this in sections so that people who (care to) follow can have some good break points.
So, here it goes!
So, it looks like where I last left off was the reception in Utah. Nothing much has changed with that one, except that we now have no idea what we’re doing for food. We were in talks with a caterer here to do the food (the one that used to babysit me as a child!), but she kept being really flaky with discussions. We’d be talking, and then all of a sudden she’d disappear off the face of the earth. I’d have to keep reaching out to her to re-establish a connection. Finally, I asked her for a quote…and then off again, no word.
So, we pulled the plug on her.
About month later, we decided we’d have this place called Teriyaki Grill do our food (they seemed cheaper, and it’s Japanese food—so it goes with the fact that we’re doing Japan in Epcot). So, I reached out to the owner and she was super enthusiastic about doing it (and, turns out, she’s high school friends with the lady doing my photo booth). Then she disappeared.
I am just so flabbergasted at how you run a business like that. You want people to give you money? You really should do your job. And I’m not the person who emailed them once and decided not to play once I never head back. We’re talking multiple attempts on my part to get this to work out. None of them panned out.
As for the catering thing…we’re now looking at very minimal self-catering. We’ve already gotten our floral BEO back (more on that later), and so I am projecting final costs of the wedding at $18K-$20K. So, anything to save money and not have it look too shabby…and I’m up for it.
And now…the most exciting thing to happen on the wedding front since I booked the darned thing December 2013!
The Planning Session (CAKE!!!!)
We had our planning session September 8, 2014. Apparently, we should have done it way earlier, because we’re now SOOO close to the wedding date (December 8) and still don’t have any idea of what this is all going to cost (except for the floral). Regardless , it was super fun. We got in on Saturday the 6th, and so we had the evening of the 6th and all day on the 7th to play around. I won’t go too much into the trip itself….because we’ve all been to DW. I don’t want to bore anyone too badly.
The session was awesome though. I have to say that I was a smidgen underwhelmed by Franck’s, because it is pretty small. I’m not sure why I expected it to be bigger, but I did. That’s cool though—it was still really pretty, all of the decorations all over the place are just awesome. I got to meet my planner, Mikki, for the first time—and she is awesome!
I think I completely underestimated before going in how much actual planning of the entire day you do at the session—but I do feel much better now about having my day turn out how I’d like. For those who have not had a planning session yet, they pretty much leave no stone unturned.
The session (sadly) started with cake tasting. I think this would have been a better element to end with, but oh well. It turned out fine though, because I hadn’t had breakfast and was honestly starving. We only had three different flavors to choose from (on account of my picky groom—why pick more flavors when you know your groom will only eat three different kinds of cake), and ended up settling on the red velvet. This surprised even me—because I honestly thought my groom was going to insist on a chocolate tier. It makes me very happy that we were able to compromise, because in my opinion, the red velvet was the most moist cake of the three we tried. Combined with their vanilla buttercream frosting (surprisingly better than cream cheese with the red velvet), I was in heaven.
Additionally, we also planned what I wanted the cake to look like. Of all the individual elements on the wedding—the cake is honestly the single item I will probably spend the most on. It sound stupid and silly (and it is), but I LOVE sweet things (especially cake) with a passion. Wedding cakes are so freaking gorgeous too—it’s edible art (I have a whole Pinterest page just for wedding cakes—and not just because I’m getting married!). I watch cake shows on TLC and Food Network, just because I love them so much. So, while I decided going in that I’d probably get a two tier and skimp on some of the elements of the cake I wanted…I decided mid-session that I was just going to have the cake I wanted, within reason. Granted, my “within reason” amount is like $900-$1,000(an insane amount for a three tier cake)…but I have requested a lot of details, and I really want a three-tier as opposed to a two. Not to mention, the plan is to marry the man of my dreams only once…
I want my one shot at a wedding cake to be fantabulous.
This was the part of the session that I probably took the most interest in, because of my love of cake. Some time ago, I found a cake on the internet that I fell in love with an decided I would mimic…while also changing a few things to try to make sure it’s not a complete rip-off of someone’s cake. Mikki said she loved the cake too, and had never seen one like it before. Just because she hadn’t seen it though doesn’t mean it wasn’t Disney’s to begin with. If you look at the photo—those Mickey heads must have been made at Disney . If not…someone is very brave to risk incurring the wrath of the Disney legal team.
So…finally, with my cake! It is based off the design above. However, what we’re going to do is have a red fondant, instead of a white. Additionally, we are removing the bow from the top tier. Instead, I’ll have swags with Mickey heads on the top two tiers. The bottom tier will have a rose border, similar to the one in the example cake—except that the roses will be red (I’m trying to see if Disney can make a black magic rose out of fondant or sugar), and the leaves will be gold. The swags themselves will be black, the Mickey heads will be gold, and I also want a gold pearl border at the base of each of the top two tiers. I also want all the gold elements to have bits of luster dust on it (to make it kind of glisten…also, kinda like pixie dust).
Below, this is a mock-up of the cake that my planner drew up for me after the session. It doesn’t have the golden pearls on the tiers, but she does make mention of it in the description. Assuming the heads are three dimensional like the cake this is based on (which it better be…), I think this will be a gorgeous cake for me. It also just goes to show why I think this cake could cost $1,000. It’s a three-tier cake, and the roses will all be done by hand. It might be cheaper to go real floral instead of sugar/fondant floral…but I want to see what the price tag comes in at first before I make that kind of decision. The roses are what I WANT…and I think having it all be edible is a big part of my wants.
The topper is also our topper. It looks like Mikki went and took an image off of Amazon and just Photoshopped it on there. It’s cute, I think. My hope is that we can get a glitter Mickey head under the topper on the top tier of the cake. I’ll make my groom remove it himself to reveal the hidden Mickey.
To get an idea of the color scheme I'm going for for the cake...I've posted the exact reds and golds I want, as demonstrated on this cake:
The only issue I'm having is that I want the roses on the bottom to be red...which is obviously sort of problematic, since the fondant is red too. So, hopefully they'll be able to make the roses more of a "black magic" rose so that we get the right contrasts against the red fondant and gold leaves. I sent them this as an idea of how to make the roses' colors work:
So...that's it for the cake part!
Tiffiny
So, in my attempt to just get it all off my chest and hopefully focus just on homework for the rest of the week…I’ll try to pick up where I left off. I’m also going to try to do this in sections so that people who (care to) follow can have some good break points.
So, here it goes!
So, it looks like where I last left off was the reception in Utah. Nothing much has changed with that one, except that we now have no idea what we’re doing for food. We were in talks with a caterer here to do the food (the one that used to babysit me as a child!), but she kept being really flaky with discussions. We’d be talking, and then all of a sudden she’d disappear off the face of the earth. I’d have to keep reaching out to her to re-establish a connection. Finally, I asked her for a quote…and then off again, no word.
So, we pulled the plug on her.
About month later, we decided we’d have this place called Teriyaki Grill do our food (they seemed cheaper, and it’s Japanese food—so it goes with the fact that we’re doing Japan in Epcot). So, I reached out to the owner and she was super enthusiastic about doing it (and, turns out, she’s high school friends with the lady doing my photo booth). Then she disappeared.
I am just so flabbergasted at how you run a business like that. You want people to give you money? You really should do your job. And I’m not the person who emailed them once and decided not to play once I never head back. We’re talking multiple attempts on my part to get this to work out. None of them panned out.
As for the catering thing…we’re now looking at very minimal self-catering. We’ve already gotten our floral BEO back (more on that later), and so I am projecting final costs of the wedding at $18K-$20K. So, anything to save money and not have it look too shabby…and I’m up for it.
And now…the most exciting thing to happen on the wedding front since I booked the darned thing December 2013!
The Planning Session (CAKE!!!!)
We had our planning session September 8, 2014. Apparently, we should have done it way earlier, because we’re now SOOO close to the wedding date (December 8) and still don’t have any idea of what this is all going to cost (except for the floral). Regardless , it was super fun. We got in on Saturday the 6th, and so we had the evening of the 6th and all day on the 7th to play around. I won’t go too much into the trip itself….because we’ve all been to DW. I don’t want to bore anyone too badly.
The session was awesome though. I have to say that I was a smidgen underwhelmed by Franck’s, because it is pretty small. I’m not sure why I expected it to be bigger, but I did. That’s cool though—it was still really pretty, all of the decorations all over the place are just awesome. I got to meet my planner, Mikki, for the first time—and she is awesome!
I think I completely underestimated before going in how much actual planning of the entire day you do at the session—but I do feel much better now about having my day turn out how I’d like. For those who have not had a planning session yet, they pretty much leave no stone unturned.
The session (sadly) started with cake tasting. I think this would have been a better element to end with, but oh well. It turned out fine though, because I hadn’t had breakfast and was honestly starving. We only had three different flavors to choose from (on account of my picky groom—why pick more flavors when you know your groom will only eat three different kinds of cake), and ended up settling on the red velvet. This surprised even me—because I honestly thought my groom was going to insist on a chocolate tier. It makes me very happy that we were able to compromise, because in my opinion, the red velvet was the most moist cake of the three we tried. Combined with their vanilla buttercream frosting (surprisingly better than cream cheese with the red velvet), I was in heaven.
Additionally, we also planned what I wanted the cake to look like. Of all the individual elements on the wedding—the cake is honestly the single item I will probably spend the most on. It sound stupid and silly (and it is), but I LOVE sweet things (especially cake) with a passion. Wedding cakes are so freaking gorgeous too—it’s edible art (I have a whole Pinterest page just for wedding cakes—and not just because I’m getting married!). I watch cake shows on TLC and Food Network, just because I love them so much. So, while I decided going in that I’d probably get a two tier and skimp on some of the elements of the cake I wanted…I decided mid-session that I was just going to have the cake I wanted, within reason. Granted, my “within reason” amount is like $900-$1,000(an insane amount for a three tier cake)…but I have requested a lot of details, and I really want a three-tier as opposed to a two. Not to mention, the plan is to marry the man of my dreams only once…
I want my one shot at a wedding cake to be fantabulous.
This was the part of the session that I probably took the most interest in, because of my love of cake. Some time ago, I found a cake on the internet that I fell in love with an decided I would mimic…while also changing a few things to try to make sure it’s not a complete rip-off of someone’s cake. Mikki said she loved the cake too, and had never seen one like it before. Just because she hadn’t seen it though doesn’t mean it wasn’t Disney’s to begin with. If you look at the photo—those Mickey heads must have been made at Disney . If not…someone is very brave to risk incurring the wrath of the Disney legal team.
So…finally, with my cake! It is based off the design above. However, what we’re going to do is have a red fondant, instead of a white. Additionally, we are removing the bow from the top tier. Instead, I’ll have swags with Mickey heads on the top two tiers. The bottom tier will have a rose border, similar to the one in the example cake—except that the roses will be red (I’m trying to see if Disney can make a black magic rose out of fondant or sugar), and the leaves will be gold. The swags themselves will be black, the Mickey heads will be gold, and I also want a gold pearl border at the base of each of the top two tiers. I also want all the gold elements to have bits of luster dust on it (to make it kind of glisten…also, kinda like pixie dust).
Below, this is a mock-up of the cake that my planner drew up for me after the session. It doesn’t have the golden pearls on the tiers, but she does make mention of it in the description. Assuming the heads are three dimensional like the cake this is based on (which it better be…), I think this will be a gorgeous cake for me. It also just goes to show why I think this cake could cost $1,000. It’s a three-tier cake, and the roses will all be done by hand. It might be cheaper to go real floral instead of sugar/fondant floral…but I want to see what the price tag comes in at first before I make that kind of decision. The roses are what I WANT…and I think having it all be edible is a big part of my wants.
The topper is also our topper. It looks like Mikki went and took an image off of Amazon and just Photoshopped it on there. It’s cute, I think. My hope is that we can get a glitter Mickey head under the topper on the top tier of the cake. I’ll make my groom remove it himself to reveal the hidden Mickey.
To get an idea of the color scheme I'm going for for the cake...I've posted the exact reds and golds I want, as demonstrated on this cake:
The only issue I'm having is that I want the roses on the bottom to be red...which is obviously sort of problematic, since the fondant is red too. So, hopefully they'll be able to make the roses more of a "black magic" rose so that we get the right contrasts against the red fondant and gold leaves. I sent them this as an idea of how to make the roses' colors work:
So...that's it for the cake part!
Tiffiny
Sounds like you're actually getting a lot for your money - especially since over $500 of your $2800'ish floral is actually just the favors/seating cards. And hey, at least you're decorating your ceremony venue! The only thing we're doing to it is the chairs. And I'm still worried about coming in over budget! I think the tables will look very neat, though, with the linens you chose. Must admit though, I'm surprised you decided to do covered chairs, even if thinking about it I can understand.
Funny that you two chose the red velvet - that's the same one we chose too. Though we didn't actually get to try it at our planning session - I actually ordered a mini cake for while we were down there, since we couldn't try everything we wanted.
It's sorta mine...since we're changing the color scheme and the top tier. Here's hoping it comes out as pretty as I'd like it to. And I think we'll go with real flowers if they end up being cheaper (depending no where everything else comes in price-wise). My goal was to try to make the whole thing edible though...so, that's what I'm hoping to do. Full-on cake art. 
I have a four-day weekend this weekend though (I have Fri-Sun off, and then we also get Columbus day off). So, hopefully I can trudge through it all, and still get to this! The sooner I get done...the more time I can waste here. 
? Im also planning a wedding in Japan with a reception at the Living Seas and hopefully an Illuminations dessert party, but way out in fall 2017. Im really glad to find a journal of someone at the same venues, it lets me a get a good idea of the things Ill need to do when my time comes. Your wedding sounds like its going to be so pretty. I love the elegant Mickey theme!
